For Sandy, that was enough. ‘I have to get out of here, Tony, or I’m gonna be the one who throws up.’ But what he really felt in danger of was choking, not vomiting. All at once the normally broad avenue of his windpipe was down to a pinhole.
Once they were back outside (it was nearly dark by then and an incredibly sweet summer breeze had sprung up), Sandy felt better. He had an idea Tony did, too; certainly some of the color had come back into the Sarge’s cheeks. Huddie and a few other Troopers came over to the two of them as Tony shut the walk-in side door, but nobody said anything. An outsider with no context upon which to draw might have looked at those faces and thought that the President had died or war had been declared.
‘Sandy?’ Tony asked. ‘Any better now?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded at the garbage bag, hanging like a dead pendulum with its strange weight at the bottom. ‘You really think it might have been our air that killed it?’
‘It’s possible. Or maybe just the shock of finding itself in our world. I don’t think I could live for long in the world this thing came from, tell you that much. Even if I could breathe the
. . .’ Tony stopped, because all at once Sandy looked bad again. Terrible, in fact. ‘Sandy, what is it? What’s wrong?’
Sandy wasn’t sure he wanted to tell his SC what was wrong, wasn’t even sure he could.
What he’d thought of was Ennis Rafferty. The idea of the missing Trooper added to what they
had just discovered in Shed B suggested a conclusion that Sandy didn’t •want to consider.
Once it had come into his mind, though, it was hard to get it back out. If the Buick was a conduit to some other world, and the bat-thing had gone through it in one direction, then Ennis Rafferty had almost certainly gone through in the other.
‘Sandy, talk to me.’
‘Nothing wrong, boss,’ Sandy replied, then had to bend over and grip his shins in both hands. It was a good way to stop yourself from fainting, always assuming you had enough time to use it. The others stood around watching him, still saying nothing, still wearing those long faces that said the King is dead, long live the King.
At last the world steadied again, and Sandy straightened up. ‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Really.’
Tony considered his face, then nodded. He lifted the green bag slightly. ‘This is going into the storage closet off the supply room, the little one where Andy Colucci keeps his stroke-books.’
A few nervous titters greeted this.
‘That room is going to be off-limits except for myself, Curtis Wilcox, and Sandy Dearborn.
BPO, people, got it?’
They nodded. By permission only.
‘Sandy, Curtis, and me — this is now our investigation, so designated.’ He stood straight in the gathering gloom, almost at attention, holding the garbage bag in one hand and the Polaroids in the other. ‘This stuff is evidence. Of what I have no current idea. If any of you come up with any ideas, bring them to me. If they seem like crazy ideas to you, bring them to me even quicker. It’s a crazy situation. But, crazy or not, we will roll this case. Roll it as we would any other. Questions?’
There were no questions. Or, if you wanted to look at it the other way, Sandy reflected, there was nothing but questions.
‘We ought to have a man on that shed as much as we can,’ Tony said.
‘Guard duty, Sarge?’ Steve Devoe asked.
‘Let’s call it surveillance,’ Tony said. ‘Come on, Sandy, stick with me until I get this thing stowed. I don’t want to take it downstairs by myself, and that’s the God’s truth.’
As they started across the parking lot, Sandy heard Arky Arkanian saying that Curt was gonna get mad he dint get called, wait and see, dat boy was gonna be madder’n a wet hen.
But Curtis was too excited to be mad, too busy trying to prioritize the things he wanted to do, too full of questions. He asked only one of those before pelting clown to look at the corpse of the creature they’d found in Shed B: where had Mister Dillon been last evening? With Orville, he was told. Orville Garrett often took Mister D when he had a few days off.
Sandy Dearborn was the one who brought Curtis up to speed (with occasional help from Arky). Curt listened silently, brows lifting when Arky described how the whole top of the
thing’s head had appeared to roll back, disclosing the eye. They lifted again when Sandy told him about the smudges on the door and the walls, and how they had reminded him of mothdust. He asked his question about Mister D, got his answer, then grabbed a pair of surgical gloves out of an evidence kit and headed downstairs at what was nearly a run. Sandy went with him. That much seemed to be his duty, somehow, since Tony had appointed him a co-investigator, but he stayed in the supply room while Curt went into the closet where Tony had left the garbage bag. Sandy heard it rustling as Curt undid the knot in the top; his skin prickled and went cold at the sound.
Rustle, rustle, rustle. Pause. Another rustle. Then, very low: ‘Christ almighty.’
A moment later Curt came running out with his hand over his mouth. There was a toilet halfway down the hall leading to the stairs. Trooper Wilcox made it just in time.
Sandy Dearborn sat at the cluttered worktable in the supply room, listening to him vomit and knowing that the vomiting probably meant nothing in the larger scheme of things. Curtis wasn’t going to back off. The corpse of the bat-thing had revolted him as much as it had Arky or Huddie or any of them, but he’d come back to examine it more fully, revulsion or no revulsion. The Buick — and the things of the Buick — had become his passion. Even coming out of the storage closet with his throat working and his cheeks pale and his hand pressed to his mouth, Sandy had seen the helpless excitement in his eyes, dimmed only a little by his physical distress. Passion is the hardest taskmaster.
From down the hall came the sound of running water. It stopped, and then Curt came back into the supply room, blotting his mouth with a paper towel.
‘Pretty awful, isn’t it?’ Sandy asked. ‘Even dead.’
‘Pretty awful,’ he agreed, but he was heading back in there even as he spoke. ‘I thought I understood, but it caught me by surprise.’
Sandy got up and went to the doorway. Curt was looking into the bag again but not reaching in. Not yet, at least. That was a relief. Sandy didn’t want to be around when the kid touched it, even wearing gloves. Didn’t even want to think about him touching it.
‘Was it a trade, do you think?’ Curt asked.
‘Huh?’
‘A trade. Ennis for this thing.’
For a moment Sandy didn’t reply. Couldn’t reply. Not because the idea was horrible (although it was), but because the kid had gotten to it so fast.
‘I don’t know.’
Curt was rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes and frowning down at the plastic garbage bag. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said after awhile. ‘When you make a swap, you usually do the whole deal at the same time. Right?’
‘Usually, yeah.’
He closed the bag and (with obvious reluctance) reknotted the top. ‘I’mn going to dissect it,’
he said.
‘Curtis, no! Christ!’
‘Yes.’ He turned to Sandy, his face drawn and white, his eyes brilliant. ‘Someone has to, and I can’t very well take it up to the Biology Department at Horlicks. Sarge says we keep this strictly in-house, and that’s the right call, but who does that leave to do this? Just me.
Unless I’m missing something.’
Sandy thought, You wouldn’t take it up to Horlicks even if Tony hadn’t said a goddam word about keeping it in-house. You can bear to have us in on it, probably because nobody but Tony really wants anything to do with it, but share it with someone else? Someone who doesn’t wear Pennsylvania gray and know when to shift the hat-strap from behind the neck to under the chin? Someone who might first get ahead of you and then take it away from you? I don’t think so.
Curt stripped off the gloves. ‘The problem is that I haven’t cut anything up since Chauncey, my fetal pig in high school biology. That was nine years ago and I got a C in the course. I don’t want to fuck this up, Sandy.’
Then don’t touch it in the first place.
Sandy thought it but didn’t say it. There would have been no point in saying it.